tommorrisit would be spectacularly useful if APIs like Twitter (and FB) would let you set them into "test" mode, which would let you call them, and they'd do everything they actually do, but don't actually publish the data to your feed for real. put a big marker next to the posts that says "FAKE POST" or something.
tommorrisI know MediaWiki API has the ability to do that. there's some parameter you can pass which basically is like a "dry run" mode. so you can test out complicated stuff and it returns everything it should do, but doesn't actually write the result to the DB
tommorrisI've written a Wikipedia bot that requires on some asynchronous queue processing (it's downloading articles for processing while other things are uploading) etc. and being able to dry run it i suseful.
Loqitommorris meant to say: I've written a Wikipedia bot that relies on some asynchronous queue processing (it's downloading articles for processing while other things are uploading) etc. and being able to dry run it i suseful.
tommorrisI really wish regexes were properly specced out, such that you could take a regex, compile it, get back a consistent parse tree, and then test that parse tree against implementations to see which features are implemented.
tommorrisnow that Node exists, I'm so tempted to make a regex tester that lets you put a regex and some sample strings in and it tests them using the regex engines in Perl, Ruby, Python, JavaScript, Java and .NET.
tantekand screw it - I'm adding another special case of not linking @-references in addition to the CSS set (@import @media @font @font-face @namespace @page @charset)
tommorrisI'm tempted to do some kind of link substitution thing by having a database which pulls from the Twitter API to translate links to Twitter usernames.
tantekIG does that as well, that is, it translates IG @-references to Twitter @-references when cross-posting, if the person @-referenced has linked their twitter account to their IG account.
aaronpktommorris: I do it the other way around. I type @t or @tantek on my site, and it links to twitter by default, or if there is a record in users.txt, links to their domain with a little icon
tommorrisI just read Sumanah's keynote at OSB2012, and it reminded me of when I met her in Israel and she said something along the lines of how getting participation starts with documenting the crap out of everything.
tommorrisactually, I wonder: that's an interesting challenge. Come up with a tweet that packs as many potential rendering bugs into 140 characters as possible.
tantekso the whole point of posting that asciibet tweet for me was so I'd have a quick an easy Helvetica reference accessible on my iPod for sketching from